Apperens Saccarees pulled the knot on his Menna sash, loosed his billows, which opened into a blood-red flower, curlicues for petals, bellied and hooked like the irises so prized in Shir. The Lord Librarian was free; Seswatha walked the ways of the present bearing ancient totems of doom. He gave voice to his heart-cracking fury, diagrammed the distance with sun-silver brilliance. The Ninth Merotic …
His crimson billows glowed like coloured glass set before the sun. The Inchoroi’s Wards luminesced for the impact of the Abstraction, nothing more. The alien abomination laughed with the lungs of the Horde.
“Aurang!” the Sohonc Grandmaster thundered. “I call upon thee! I demand a Disputation—as in days of old!”
And at last the monstrosity dared swoop low.
“The days are new Chigra …”
His passage sparked rapture in the swarms of Sranc below, an ejaculatory wake.
“And far shorter than the old.”
The Horde-General banked on a tangent to the wind, turned north and west as if on the arc of a great, invisible wheel. The standards of the clans jerked and heaved above oceans of crushed white faces.
“Aurang!” Saccarees cried out to the receding image, his face crimped in anguish, dreaming and not dreaming.
The wretched multitudes screamed in derision, their limbs spitting like muck beneath torrential rain.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor ceased singing. The soaring wreckage instantly slowed, then slumped crashing back into the throat of the Well, leaving only the smoky apparition of the geyser. The vibration of fracturing immensities faded. Veils of dust twisted across the Ribbaral, lending the air the taste of dust and rot.
The Company of the Raft stood astonished and hard-breathing among the giant carcasses. Though several of their brothers floundered upon the ground, they had eyes only for his Lord-and-Prophet, who floated above them at the height of flying gulls or geese …
Holding the golden coffer suspended just beyond the reach of his haloed hands, he came to ground on the Well’s western limit. Saubon held out his arms to restrain his Knights, then moved to follow his Lord-and-Prophet alone. The salt statue that had been Gwanw? clubbed his heart as he sprinted near, but the sight of Kellhus setting the golden receptacle upon the back of a dead Bashrag filled him with far more apprehension.
Never had Saubon seen him handle anything with such ghostly care.
It was not made of gold—he could see that now. It had the exhumed look of something drawn from crushing depth—it was chalked in whorls of dust and grit—and yet had not been scuffed, let alone bent, nicked, or dented. It was no larger than a dollhouse, but seemed larger for the piping that enclosed it—a scaffold that somehow held the interior cube without touching it. Eye-squinting filigree had been etched into almost every surface, geometric impressions that somehow jarred scrutiny. But nothing was so remarkable as the plate of polished obsidian forming the top of the receptacle, and the luminous characters scrolling both within and across it—a kind of script inked in light.
Kellhus paid him no regard whatsoever. The maw of the Well smoked to his left, mere paces distant. The noon sun conjured transparent gowns of shadow from high-climbing tatters. “What is it?” the Exalt-General asked, knowing he need only speak for the man to hear. His Lord-and-Prophet looked to him, his manner catastrophic for the utter absence of expression.
Three heartbeats passed.
“An Inchoroi object,” Kellhus said, his voice no less miraculous for how it punctured the bottomless din. “A Tekne artifact.”
Saubon had to think to breathe, breathe to think. “The writing that glowers upon it … What does it say?”
The Horde stole each and every one of these words.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas stood, retreated a single pace as if to better appraise the thing. Though his eyes remained fixed on the receptacle, Saubon knew that he stared at nothing present before him.
“That not everyone can be saved,” Kellhus said.
Fear skittered as a many-legged chill across the Believer-King’s skin.
“What do you say?” Saubon asked, too numb to be properly bewildered.
The leonine profile lowered in contemplation, his gaze wet and rigid.
The Nuns continued singing from points about the ancient perimeter, continued weaving meaning into patterns of murderous radiance. The ink of fat-fuelled fires now scribbled above the crest of every wall. Dagliash was their mountain—the most perilous eyrie of them all.
His Saviour turned to him, smiled what might have counted as an apology had they played number-sticks.
“That this is a good thing.”
Kellhus glanced at the coffer and the intricate threads racing across it one final time. Light speared from his mouth. The hood was yanked from the lanterns in his eyes.
His shout, when it came, concussed. Saubon fell back, threw up arms against the blazing aspect that spake it. The walls spat dust from every slot and seam.
“Fleeee!”
Saubon gawked in horror. Bogyar was already hauling him to his feet, screaming without sound. The Holy Aspect-Emperor stepped in the empty air above the Ribbaral, his mouth a pit of white brilliance in his beard, his voice booming from nowhere, or at least no place in Creation:
“Sons of Men, hark!”
Cracking the Horde’s wail …
“Set aside your fury!”